As
mentioned in this week’s World's Laziest Journalist column, on Friday Eason Jordan resigned his position.He was CNN’s chief news
executive and led much of that network's war coverage.Is seems that on January
27 in Davos, Switzerland, at The World Economic Forum, in an informal panel discussion, he suggested that US troops had targeted
and killed journalists.He immediately back-peddled and said that was what was
being said in much of the Arab media, and he didn’t know that was so, but the damage was done.Word got around.The same right-wing blogs that claimed to
have brought down Dan Rather sensed blood in the water, Fox News picked it up, and the fellow threw in the towel.(Yes, there is a mix of shark and boxing metaphor there, but you get the idea.)

My
local newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, carried the story here on Saturday morning.There I discovered the panel discussion in question was
one called to discuss "Will Democracy Survive the Media?"

Yeah,
but will the media survive the we’ll-destroy-you world of web logs and advocacy news organizations like Fox?

The
Times mentions this too –

The World Economic Forum… has
declined to release the transcript or videotape of the off-the-record session….

In a statement Jordan sent to
his staff Friday, the CNN executive vice president cited "conflicting accounts" over his recent remarks as a threat to the
news organization's credibility. In resigning, Jordan said he sought "to prevent CNN from being further tarnished by the controversy."

In
short, who needs this kind of hassle?

The
hassle?

In a commentary in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, a member of the paper's editorial board who
had attended the session, described the exchange. "Mr. Jordan observed that of the 60-odd journalists killed in Iraq, 12 had
been targeted and killed by U.S. forces," Stephens wrote.

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who had shared the Davos
stage with Jordan as a panelist, told the Washington Post that the CNN executive at first implied "it was official military
policy to take out journalists." After other panelists challenged him, Jordan then "modified" his remarks, Frank said, but
did not remove the sense that U.S. soldiers intended to harm those they knew to be journalists.

… the panel's moderator, David
Gergen … said in an interview last night that Mr. Jordan had initially spoken of soldiers, "on both sides," who he believed
had been "targeting" some of the more than four dozen journalists killed in Iraq.

Almost immediately after making that assertion,
Mr. Jordan… "quickly walked that back to make it clear that there was no policy on the part of the U.S. government to
target or injure journalists," Mr. Gergen said.

Too
late.Heck, it seems Bret Stephens, a member of the Wall Street Journal
editorial board who attended the session in Davos, later wrote that Jordan had "made a defamatory innuendo" but added: "Mr.
Jordan deserves some credit for retracting the substance of his remark, and some forgiveness for trying to weasel his way
out of a bad situation of his own making."

There’s
a backhanded bit of pseudo-graciousness!

None
of it mattered.There was the web and the commentators -

There
is, for example, the website - Easongate.com – which acted as a clearing house for all the rants about Jordan and CNN – and it links to twenty-five other
sites that called for blood – from Roger L. Simon to Red State Rant and Winds of Change.Easongate.com on Friday posted this –

"To every reader, commentator,
emailer and blogger that committed to this cause, thank you," the statement said. "This is a victory for every soldier who
has honorably served this nation."

Yeah,
whatever.

And
what of Eason?

While at CNN, Jordan also had provoked
many activists and critics in an April 2003 opinion piece in the New York Times. Jordan asserted that he sometimes
could not allow his network to report all it had learned during the intense early days of combat in Iraq, for fear that releasing
certain confidential information would put lives in jeopardy.

In September 2003, a corporate restructuring at CNN resulted
in a job change for Jordan, who no longer oversaw the day-to-day news gathering operations. Recently, he has been responsible
for orchestrating the network's overseas coverage.

A 23-year veteran of the network, Jordan had participated in and
overseen much of the network's round-the-clock coverage of combat zones.

In his farewell letter Friday, he cited many
decades of close contact he had had with the military while reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.

Jordan
began his CNN career in the network's early years, after having worked for local news outlets in Atlanta.

Regular
Just Above Sunset contributor Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, knows him well.Rick and his wife and Eason Jordan were in from the start.

Times change.

Oh yeah – go here for a compilation of names of journalists killed in Iraq by United States troops, twelve of whom this guy says might well
have been killed on purpose.Or is that executed?There’s something there.Jordan wasn’t making
things up, but he needs to remember that if he senses a story people don’t want to hear, even mentioning it casually,
then qualifying it a bit, can end your career.

Nosing around something no one else has covered is something
no good newsman does?Ah heck, stick to the narrative.People want to believe what they want to believe, so report that.And keep your job.

What my brother once said about the restaurant business –
and he had a good twenty-sever year run at that – is probably true of the news business.Offend the most people the least.That may be the secret of success.

__

Note:
In the companion piece to this - Press Scandal Right – we see the right wing bloggers are crowing over forcing Jeff Gannon to quit Talon News and give up his plum White
House assignment.He appears to have been a ringer in the press conferences,
the reporter who asks the softball question so the administration doesn’t have to get hammered with the real, hard questions.